Posts by Doctor Syntax

Social media snitching bill introduced into US Congress by intel bosses

"Senate Intelligence Committee"

Oxymoron?

US government pushing again on encryption bypass

Nurse...

...they're out of bed again.

Re: for goodness sake

"If they passed a law that prevented this sort of thing it would be offered via apps from somewhere outside the US."

That boat's sailed already. Telegram is from Germany and the owners are Russian, I think, so even if Germany joined in the idiocy they'd just move on somewhere else.

Revealed: Mystery 7-year cyberspy campaign in Latin America

Isn't ALBA the likes of Venezuela (give or take the result of the recent election)? If so I'd have thought the US would have been likely to be supporting opposition groups there, not spying on them.

'Personalised BBC' can algorithmically pander to your prejudices

Sounds like a good thing...

...if it can control the ratio of content to padding in Horizon etc.

Enraged Brits demand Donald Trump UK ban

Re: Great value

"Carter blocked Iranians coming to the US until some things got sorted out"

I think there's a difference between the nationals of a specific country in specific circumstances (with the connivance of the Iranian govt a rabble had taken over the US embassy) and members of a religion from a wide range of countries.

"there is no indication the billionaire überpatriot intends to visit our shores."

Doesn't he have some business in Scotland to do with balls (appropriately enough)? He might want to visit that.

Re: There are two points of view

"When you use juvenile and derogatory tactics l...you negate any chance of being taken seriously by intelligent people."

Good point. Would references to the traitor in the White House be an example?

MPs slam gov heads over 'childishness' on failed farmer IT project

Re: What was the "dysfunctional and childish behaviour"

It would have helped if the article had a link to the report - https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Early-review-of-the-Common-Agricultural-Policy-Delivery-Programme.pdf

The relevant paras are at pp 28 - 29. Of course "childish" isn't actually mentioned in the report. I suspect the members of the committee have access to a good deal more information than is in the report itself.

I like the raising of the question as to why people are still in post. It's time to end the culture of people remaining in positions of responsibility for such failures.

Libertarian hero: 'Satoshi Nakamoto', government funds, the NSA and the DHS

Re: NSA

"the bitcoin creator was working hand in hand with NSA, and they are able de-anonomize the blockchain"

I thought everybody know that.

In-a-spin! Yahoo! clutches! Alibaba! baby! to! breast!

Re: Makes sense

"admin assistant (or whatever the PC types call them these days)"

Intern. Added advantage is that they don't have to be paid.

Microsoft pitches lobotomized Cortana for iOS, Android handsets

"restrictions third-party apps have on access to system components in both OSs"

I thought the usual complaint is that these restrictions are negligible.

Mandatory data breach reporting rules finally agreed by EUrocrats

Critical national infrastructure

"operators in energy, transport, health, and banking"

Surely water, including drainage, and communications,including internet services, should be included as part of that infrastructure.

HPE's private London drinking club: Name that boozer

Ye Olde Apothecary

Mozilla confirms its Firefox OS phones are dead

Re: Allow the apps to run in both mobile and desktop

"Generating another username and password pair are zero cost."

Except in terms of security, of course.

France mulls tighter noose around crypto

"Northern Ireland (mainly a territorial dispute local to that land) is a far cry from religiously-crazed madmen"

Thanks for explaining that to me. I must have been standing a bit too close to notice that they weren't religiously-crazed madmen.

A/C, I don't know what your experience is of dealing with terrorism but mine amounts to 19 years living in N Ireland from the late 60s to the mid 80s and most of that time working in forensic science so I think I can claim it to be substantial.

Firstly, one adapts. The casualties were a tiny minority of the population. One realised the odds were vastly, overwhelmingly in one's favour - even in the face of a couple of incidents which could have turned out badly.

Secondly, what this over-reaction amounts to is the French government treating the entire French population as bad guys. That cannot be right. If my experience taught me anything it is that the presumption of innocence is a fundamental requirement of a free and civilised society. It's the terrorists who take the opposite view; they must be resisted and adopting their standards is not the way to resist them.

So, ban all cryptography. That includes WPA on wireless connections. There's not much point in pulling the plug on "public" access points if you're going to make all access points effectively public. Or is all wireless networking to be illegal?

Cheque, mate? Barclays Bank borked as website, apps take cheeky siesta

"Good luck with finding a shop that will accept cheques nowadays!"

At the rate things are going, any shop whose bank network is down today.

It looks as if we really will have to start carrying cheque books again.

Linksys routers vulnerable through CGI scripts

It really doesn't matter what make or whatever level it's been patched to: no remote admin.

Most businesses collecting data they never use, survey finds

"Unfortunately security is also expensive."

And, it seems, optional. After all, it's been shown that if you have enough brass neck you can just weather the shit storm when data goes walkabout.

Re: Though shall not question the big data religion

Nice post except the word you were looking for is "thou".

Veritas email faux-pas adds insult to injury for exam candidates

What's another information leak between friends?

Putin's Russia outlaws ECHR judgments after mass surveillance case

"The Register has contacted the Council of Europe's directorate of communications to enquire about the future of Russia's membership, considering the legal room it is affording itself to ignore ECHR judgments. We will update this article if we receive a response."

Most likely you'll get some guff about keeping channels of communication open which means nothing will happen.

Windows Phone won't ever succeed, says IDC

Re: I could be a future Microsoft phone customer too

"I don't see Android being a desktop replacement"

Coincidentally this piece of news arrived today from Another Place: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/12/07/0249252/remix-mini-review-a-70-android-desktop-pc

Being dissed by an analyst must be good news for MS.

Mozilla bins 'Tiles' ads plan in Firefox

“Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users.”

Translation 1: It seemed as good idea at the time.

Translation 2: Another fine mess.

Re: The money...

"Now I know that good programmers aren't cheap, but $200 Million in one year? And what is that $40Million in marketing being spent on?"

And the $38m on admin? Spent on making dubious decisions such as advertising tiles?

Smut-seeding Prenda Law ringleader must sell home to pay $2.5m debt

Re: More upside The only downsides

"Don't worry, this is only one of several ongoing cases against them."

I should have included "yet" in my last sentence. Perjury doesn't go down too well with the courts on this side of the pond either.

The only downsides

Ken White decided over a year ago that they'd become too boring & stopped writing up their antics.

No judge seems to have decided that they'll be provided with alternative housing for a substantial number of years

BOFH: Taking a spin in a decommissioned racer? On your own grill cam be it

Re: Ferris Bueller!

'carrying its shoulder.

BTW, should there be an apostrophe in the "it's" above?'

Let's work that out. "It's" is short for "it is". So does "carrying it is shoulder" make sense? No it doesn't. So there shouldn't be an apostrophe.

Alternative version: "its" is an impersonal pronoun equivalent to "his". Do you write "hi's"? No you don't so when you need a possessive pronoun you use "its".

HTH

Microsoft encrypts explanation of borked Windows 10 encryption

Re: When is someone going to file a UK Class Action against M$

"The NEW consumer regulation allow for something LIKE a CLA. Im not entirely familiar with the ins and outs"

Quite correct. You're not entirely familiar with the ins & outs. It's only available in limited circumstances related to competition.

Simple explanation

They put the query through to the hell-desk.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

Re: Shame on you Mr Dabbs

"In the end I settled on ranting at the council till they gave in"

Upvote for your stamina, sir.

"Computer components don't fail."

PSU electrolytics do. And batteries which you have to count as components in some cases due to their being glued in.

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

Never close the door.

How to do it properly. I was offered early retirement from $BigCo for lacking both personal qualities of which one was a minimum requirement to deal with management: the ability to suspend disbelief and the ability to conceal disgust. Anyway, good terms were agreed - finish at end of year, several months away and best possible terms under IR regulations so no hard feelings either way.

Of course under these circumstances one gets lumbered with the odd project nobody wants, in my case one which had come down from national management. I would do phase one & my line manager would then take over for phase two.

So at the year end I started off for what turned out to be 10 years freelance. This got off to a good start because a few weeks into the year when I'd just got the first short contract finished when they rung up. Line manager was leaving, would I come back on contract & do phase two? After phase two there was a follow-up to start on the no-longer-project-but-new-business-as-usual work until some victim could be found to off-load it onto.

So, because everything was done in a friendly fashion I got 6 months freelance work & $BigCo got its work done.

"I didn't get my final invoice paid"

I always tried to get in a clause to say that IP only belonged to the clients when all invoices had been paid. Never had to use it.

Per-core licences coming to Windows Server and System Center 2016

Re: Excellent!

"a broken hybrid environment the users hate - and that now it would cost too much to reverse it even though they desperately want to!"

It's surprising how often this canard keeps flying.

Re: Excellent!

"No-one wants to pay the ever increasing and restrictive licensing fees but maybe the management are a bit more clueful than you when it come to considering TCO, ROI, Change management, risk management, staff specialisation etc"

I think that all too often what management are more clueful about is taking each quarter as it comes and stuff the long term thinking.

Big names settle out of court with CryptoPeak in HTTPS patent spat

Re: East texas - patent troll heaven.

"As for *this* patent, anyone that signed off and settled should have the right to sue the troll back to oblivion if *any* of the others fights it and wins."

I'd guess the terms of settlement preclude that.

Re: Paying the Danegeld...

Did they sue Newegg? I suspect by now most trolls won't, at least not until they've picked the low-hanging fruit. Maybe other victims should watch and learn.

New edition of Windows 10 turns security nightmares into reality

Re: There is another option

"Well, software has a rather larger state space than a toaster, so good luck with that."

One option would be to stop cramming junk in. Make the state space smaller, spend more time testing.

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

Libremail?

If anybody's still following this thread, and bearing in mind the thought that several of have about T'bird linking up with LibreOffice this page is rather encouraging: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Ideas_for_the_integration_of_Thunderbird_with_LibreOffice

Re: Nylas N1

Let's take a look. The site has a documentation tab so let's look at the user documents. WHAT???!!!!

There isn't any. Just developer documentation. Yet another O/S project that's not interested in users.

Re: A Really Good Email Cluent

'Isn't that in the account settings, "Manage identities?". If you have an alias set for an account there, TB will automatically use the matching reply-to when you respond. If you don't set it, you get the core email address for the account. I use it for generic incoming addresses like "info@".'

Yup. That works for me. Plus if you have the identities set up you get a drop down list to select the identity to use when sending a new email.

'I prefer clunky and brutally functional over flashy and useless any day.'

Agree again. Actually I prefer non-flashy and functional over flashy and functional.

Microsoft's full-fat E5 Office 365 plan with phone extras goes live

"There are additional security features. E5 "Advanced Security" includes Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Exchange Online, with behavioral malware analysis and blocking and tracing of malicious links in emails. ATP is also available as an add-on for other plans."

This wonderful offer brought to you by the company whose Hotmail/Live/Outlook/NameOfTheWeek service leaks spam pretending to be from themselves. This really is something they should be on top of if for no other reason that they're tolerating infringement of their own trademarks.

Booming Ballmer bellows 'bulls**t' over Microsoft's cloud revenue run rate

Re: Hang on, is Ballmer starting to have a vision ?

"And by keeping his shares he's also keeping his money very much where his mouth is."

Or vice versa.

Music publisher BMG vs US cable giant Cox: Here's why it matters

"but the post didn't come up to allow me to edit it."

Sometimes that happens. Annoying, isn't it?

Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

Re: I want one to block facebook and whatsapp

"the HR bloke being one of the most irritating and least useful."

By definition.